The RAC had an Internationally recognised road race to its name, but no venue on which to run it. Until that is, Fred Craner of the Derby & District Motor Club was contacted concerning a possible move to the splendid road course which he ran at Donington Park, on the Derbyshire/Leicestershire border. Tough, grizzled, irascible Fred was up for it, and the RAC Tourist Trophy was consequently run at Donington in both 1937 and 1938, before the deteriorating International situation – much discussed, and feared, at that time, dictated no event being held in 1939.
After the war years, the RAC TT was finally revived in a return to Ulster, this time onto the Dundrod road circuit, a shorter but no less challenging Ards lookalike on rural public roads closed for the race weekend. It was there that Stirling Moss made the race his own – scoring his first International ‘big-car’ win there in Tommy Wisdom’s Jaguar XK120 in 1950, then following up with a second consecutive victory in the works C-Type Jaguar in 1951. There was no 1952 race run but in 1953 Aston Martin won at Dundrod with the DB3S co-driven by Peter Collins/Pat Griffith, and in 1954 the RAC’s rather silly handicap system handed victory to the 745cc Panhard of Gerard Laureau/Paul Armagnac. Come 1955 and we saw a Homeric tussle between the factory Mercedes-Benz 300SLR fleet and the lone Mike Hawthorn/Desmond Titterington D-Type Jaguar. Moss won his third Dundrod TT for Jaguar. Tragically, two drivers – Jim Mayers and Bill Smith – were killed in a horrific, fiery, multiple accident on the race’s second lap, and later in the event another driver died when his Elva overturned and also erupted into a fireball, leaving horrified onlookers no chance to save the poor driver – Richard Mainwaring – trapped beneath.
These disasters spelt the end of motor racing at Dundrod, although it has thrived ever since within the two-wheeled racing world, and 1956-57 would pass without an RAC TT until the great race was revived back on the mainland, at Goodwood in 1958…
Of course, Aston Martin dominated those two sportscar TTs of 1958-59 – Moss sharing the winning DBR1 car on both occasions – with Tony Brooks in ’58 and then with Carroll Shelby/Jack Fairman in ’59 after his initially-assigned car had been burned out at a bungled refuelling stop.